The Pre-Story:

Michelle wanted to upgrade her site from the rather dated look it had; and also move the focus from working only with brands, to also working with emerging designers. When Michelle got in touch with me, she’d already spent quite a few dollars and months waiting for her ‘developer’ to create a new site for her. He’d apparently told her that she’d need a brand new domain…. yet, after much ado.. there was nothing much to show for it. The new site didn’t look any better than her old one – and after months, was far from done. This is what her old site looked like:

The Website Work:

She’d opted for the The Deep Dive Package, and through the next two weeks, we worked together.

We started with getting clear on her business goals and the website goals – especially how she wanted to approach the two different kinds of audiences. Then we dug deeper into her ideal client – emerging designers. We narrowed down their pain points, how she could help them, what would make them look up to her as authority.

Then we got to the implementation – Michelle working away on the copy; me creating the layouts, the structures, putting in place the plugins etc…

A week later, her photo shoot came in.. and again.. like most other shoots, the photos were just not ‘designed’ for the web experience. They were mostly squarish images – that couldn’t be used for the headers. And there weren’t any with transparent backgrounds for me to use in between.

I knew how much Michelle wanted the site up before she traveled to a client location – and that her photographer had been way to busy to even get these edited.. so I got to work with my photo editing skills. I found a few fabric textures to use as headers, instead of images of Michelle. Then I pieced together one header image with a brick wall ; edited the other images to go with the flow of the copy and layout and some other stuff.. and walah..

This was Michelle’s reaction the first time she saw the site:

But it works both ways. Michelle was a dream client for me!

She was clear on what she wanted and communicated it effectively. Beyond that, she was open to feedback and the probing questions I sent her way. She trusted my judgement as I tweaked her copy, restructured things, put together the layouts and edited her images.

But more than that, working on her site was one smooth state of flow. Not only was she was tech savvy, but was as particular about communication and organization as I am. We shared all files, copy, images through Dropbox. Calls every other day. And clear crisp email. I just wish all clients were that easy to work with.  No mis-communication. No back and forth.  It was like clock work!

I hated to see this project come to an end!

The Silver Lining:

I’d put up a simple “Coming Soon” page while I worked on the back-end. But just for the heck of it – I’d left the menu visible. And boom!! 1 day before we took the site live, Michelle got her very first lead through the contact page! Yes, someone actually looked her up – and found her on this not-yet-live site – and reached to her.

What a way to launch!!

Visit the live site [Note: the live site may change over time => so, say 1 year later, it may look diff from the image above!]